Grant Will Revive Planning To Develop New Orleans

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: April 20, 2006

Louisiana officials plan to unveil an organization today that will revive the process of creating a New Orleans rebuilding plan, using $3.5 million newly pledged by the Rockefeller Foundation.

The ambitious effort calls for six months of work by urban planners, architects and other experts, along with public meetings in New Orleans's 13 community districts and in the four cities that have taken in the greatest number of the displaced: Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Dallas and Houston.

Billions of dollars in federal community development grants cannot be released until a comprehensive rebuilding plan for the state is in place. Sean Reilly, a member of the board of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which is readying the statewide plan, said the other affected parishes had completed their basic planning, leaving Orleans Parish as ''the last and most important piece of the puzzle.'' The city's Bring Back New Orleans Commission was putting neighborhood-by-neighborhood planning in place when federal financing dried up.

The new group, the Community Fund Support Organization, will be managed by the Greater New Orleans Foundation, a local public charity. The full budget for the planning process has been estimated at $7.9 million. The portion not covered by the new Rockefeller Foundation pledge is to be raised from public and private sources.

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana applauded the grant and the planning process that it will produce.

''What people need is to get the right kind of information to make smart decisions for themselves, and it's the one ingredient that they have not been given,'' Ms. Blanco said in an interview. ''They just hear noises out there, but nobody has sat down in the various neighborhoods, and it has to be done that way.''

The Rockefeller Foundation, which has already provided $3 million to Louisiana since Hurricane Katrina, is one of the nation's largest foundations, with assets of more than $3 billion.

The sum it is providing for the planning effort is unusually large, said Darren Walker, director of the foundation's domestic program. Holding some public meetings outside the state will add to the time and expense required, Mr. Walker said, but it is essential that the people of New Orleans have a voice in the process, wherever they are.

''Everyone has a role to play,'' he said, adding that the effort ''marries the best of urban planning with the wisdom and local knowledge and authentic voice of community residents.''

''We owe it to ourselves as a nation,'' Mr. Walker said, ''to not allow this opportunity to pass.''